100% agreed. The best part is nobody ever could provide an explanation for when the beast of bureaucracy would stop being fed. It is just a given that it must grow and grow and grow. Whether you voted for it or not. And don't you dare question it because questioning it is Fascism (from people who have never seen the actual results of real Fascism).
The government could be more efficient, but you have to look at the exact choices being made by the current administration. Why are we heavily taxing trade and the flow of ideas? Why are we dismantling our military with 2 major wars going on? Why are we being soft on financial crimes and crypto scams? Why are we accepting personal gifts from nation states? Why are we micromanaging medical care? Why are we removing our "soft power" influence? Why are we spending our money to "crack down" on people with autism? Why are we using the government's money to fund religious indoctrination?
There is always an argument to make the government more efficient, but I don't think this <gestures> is what anyone really has in mind. People want cheaper eggs, the ability to receive medical care, the ability to stabilize their living situation through property ownership, and a stable job. What are we doing about those things? The reality is that the "machine" has always tried to add stability in those areas, and throwing away the machine isn't making things better for anyone. Like, if we made the government so efficient, why am I still paying 40% of my income in taxes?
When we disappear people to El Salvador without trial, that's fascism, my friend.
The thing with Americans is that they've had it so good for so long they don't even know what bad looks like. People who come from oppressive governments and have lived through it actually do. Notice I never mentioned efficiency in my original post, you assumed that's what I meant. I meant the oppressive nature of just the shear unending growth of the US government and the weight that bears upon it's people, its businesses, and most importantly it's morale.
It's hardly a given. Bureaucracy rarely just forms out of thin air, unless you happen to be the richest man in the world and receive a federal agency to carry out your whims with.
Often it arises from the demands of the public after private interests (many of whom are now excessively capitalized by any definition of that term) have deemed the public need to be inconvenient to their desires to make the maximum possible return on their investments. That, or to prevent tragedies of the commons.
By the way, plenty of people have both had first-hand experience with fascism and call the Trumpist cult by that name. No one's being called a fascist because they want to stabilize the fiscal position of the country's government; they're being called fascist because they say they want that, then hire a guy with no respect for rule of law to do the exact opposite of that.
The idea is to greatly reduce the size of the administrative state and take what used to be functions of government and make them either go away entirely or privatize them.
Whether this is a good idea or not is not what I'm getting at, but yeah, it's a major dismantling of institutions that touch the everyday lives of Americans (and the world).
I’m very torn. Obviously USAID, NSF and academia in general do valuable things. But when organizations get hijacked and used as a slush fund to fund naked ideological activities and organizations barely related to the original purpose, I’m not surprised when the eventual response is to just hack and slash. I wish it was done more thoughtfully and carefully, but that doesn’t appear to be a choice. Just a choice of funding hostile NGOs and academics who endorse discrimination in education, employment, health care and even law nowadays or the current mess. It all sucks and I don’t have any solutions other than focusing on my career and family.
I haven't seen any reasonable evidence on this. I'm not saying that evidence doesn't exist, it's just everything that I've heard so far as been debunked. The current administration has been shown to lie and exaggerate over and over to justify these actions so I don't know why anyone would assume they're telling the truth about this.
Educational institutions that have been banned from practicing racial discrimination in admissions (such as all public universities in California since the 90's) have insisted on continuing to find other ways to covertly racially discriminate in admissions. It's clear from their actions that racial discrimination in admissions is a fundamental value for these institutions, and they should not receive any taxpayer funding until they stop such disgusting and bigoted behavior.
